Stars of the Show

It was kind of a slow-moving day yesterday since I'd only slept a few hours the night before. Any sleep the night before came after 4:30 a.m., and so you know I was moving slow most of the day. There was no napping involved, but I did down a couple of shots of espresso early in the afternoon. Aside from the espresso, the only thing I accomplished was getting in a little more practice on the stylized stars. Starting on the bottom half of my first practice piece, I decided to try joining them with just one loop, and to go straight across rather than trying to do an upsy-downsy thing as I did the day before. Also, I tried adding wavy lines between the rows, and I really liked that.

The lines suggest a flag blowing in the breeze to my eyes. Also, if I do three lines, I can get back to the beginning of the next row of stars. I'm planning to do this as an edge-to-edge design. Accounting for the limits of my bobbin thread and thread breakage, potentially I could do the whole quilt from start to finish without ever cutting thread. 

So then, I wanted to practice the design some more, and I had another good-sized practice piece to work on. The old piece landed on the floor where I threw it, and that generated a lot of interest, as you might imagine.

Hey Smitty! Check out Mom's quilting!

Oh wow, Sadie. There's nothing I like better than a quilt on the floor.

They make excellent bath mats.

Meowzers! Do you smell that, Sadie? I had no idea my massive thigh muscles were so odifurrous!

What does that smell like to you? Purrhaps you can catch a whiff of an alluring men's furragrance? Something like Eufurria for Men...or pawsibly it smells like Furrsace pour homme?

Hm...I'm catching a whiff of something, Smitty. Let me think...

Peppurrmint. Yeah, I'm thinking peppurrmint for sure.

Oh Sadie. Sometimes you furrustrate me with your pawcity of purrnache. 

I'll furrgive you since you started life as a street-walker cat.

Then I went on doing more practice on a new piece. I've filled about half of it now, and I'll fill the other half before starting on the quilt.

The only other thing that happened yesterday was that the bagel ingredients I ordered approximately ten years ago finally arrived. Deliveries have been rare in this weather. My only question is why the trucks can make it to our house on some days, but not on others. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. In any case, there's no excuse for not getting to work on the bagels now.

This is apparently what I'll need to make a genuine New York style bagel. (I wonder how many different specialty flours I will accumulate by the time I've gone all the way through the Bread Baker's Apprentice book.) There will be no baking today, however. We're getting together with the kids tomorrow to try to decide on a destination for our family weekend planned for June. We've selected Hood River, Oregon, but still need to decide on a place to stay. With so much snow at our place, we're going to take the food down to Erik and Mae's house in the valley and meet up there. And all of that to say that I'm making a couple of salads today. Tomorrow I'll be making a roast beef sandwich mix that is a family favorite, and so there's plenty of work to do in the kitchen for the next couple of days. Bagels will have to wait until Monday.